The battle to keep online shoppers stay on your e commerce site

Having a competitive ecommerce site is a must in today’s economy. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, consumers spent 36.2 billion dollars online in Q4 of 2007, a 36.7 percent increase over the same quarter just two years ago.

The growth in online spending makes it that much more critical to choose the right platform for an online store. There are numerous platforms available at varying price points, but the total cost of ownership comes down to a shopping cart’s features, scalability, security, reliability, and support.

As more and more consumers flock online to find bargains, more merchants are turning online to meet their needs. The landscape is getting competitive and ensuring that your shopping cart software has the tools to keep up determines if a business has the infrastructure to compete and grow.

• Social and world-of-mouth marketing. 68 percent of all online shoppers look for customer reviews on websites. The average internet shopper tells 12 members, friends relatives and coworkers about their internet shopping experience, and this figure will only increase as more and more people bring their conversations online in public spaces. Having features such as customer reviews, email a friend capabilities, and integrations with third party social networks can be key to capitalizing on word of mouth marketing.
• Customers expect to see clean, easy to navigate websites. Following in suit with companies like Apple, online stores are cleaning up their interfaces in order to improve the user experience. Homepages are increasingly less cluttered. Companies large and small are launching websites that are also more personable with more detailed company and staff information. Design flexibility becomes key in expressing a company’s identity and mission.
• Detailed and easy to use product pages improve conversion rates. If a customer does not have the information he or she needs to make an informed decision, he or she will probably turn to another online store to meet that need. Color swatch functionality, flexibility with product options, and the ability to use custom html, multiple product photos, and even video become key.
• 2007 saw faster checkouts and less mandatory registration upon checkout. Three and four page checkout pages and the lack of a guest option upon checkout are detrimental to the user experience and can result in many lost sales.